“Why is her eye watery like that?”
I bent over to get a closer look. “I don’t know,” I told her. “Cats just get watery eyes sometimes. Maybe her sister bopped her in the face. But what’s this stuff in her eye? Some kind of goop?”
“I think that’s her eyelid. Her eyelid is swelling,” she said.
“It could only be allergies, or a reaction to the smoke from the forest fires. How to allergies work for cats? Do cats get allergies?”
“I don’t know. Well, keep checking on her. See if it gets any worse.”
“She’s acting fine.”
“I know.”
* * *
“It’s not great.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Well …” I was never good at giving bad news. “The vet said that we’ve got three scenarios. If she has an infection, they’ll give her antibiotics, and she’ll be okay. If it’s a growth, she has to get surgery. And, um, they said they’d have to take her eye.”
“Her eye?”
“The growth’s in her forehead, and it’s clearly pressing on her eye.”
She didn’t answer me.
“And then there’s the third scenario, which is that our cat is riddled with cancer and has very little time to live.”
She didn’t answer again.
“Losing an eye isn’t bad for a cat,” I tried.
“I’ve seen cats with one eye before,” she said. “They’re kind of cute.”
“It’d be fine. We’ll give her an eyepatch and have a pirate cat. A pirate cat would be fun.”
* * *
“The swelling is definitely worse,” I said.
“She looks worse because they were poking and prodding her eye. They gave her antibiotics, so if it’s only an infection, she’ll look better soon.”
“They said it’d take a week for the biopsy results.”
She said, “I’m going to feel like such an idiot if it’s only an infection, after telling all our friends that my cat was going to lose an eye, or die.”
“Well, we don’t know anything yet,” I cautioned.
“If she really is sick, do they have vets that do the euthanasia at home?”
I had no clue. “They might. But if we did that, which room would we do it in? How are you supposed to decide where to do it? Because that room would be permanently marred by a dead cat.”
“I don’t even know how it works for humans,” she admitted. “If you’re visiting grandma in the hospital and she dies on you, what do they do? Do they cart the body out of there and put it on ice as fast as they can? Or do they have you sit with the body and just look at it for awhile? It’s either too hasty or too morbid, whichever way you do it.”
“Do you think some of the family members just go straight home after it happens? You’ve got to stick around for at least awhile.”
“You have to stay to sign the death certificate, don’t you?”
“Does the family sign the death certificate?” I asked. “I thought that the doctor handled that. I mean, what’s the point in a family member signing it? What do you even do with a death certificate?”
“I don’t know how any of this works,” she said.
* * *
“Well, I called them for another appointment,” she told me. “Tuesday at noon. Do you know what the woman on the phone said to me? I told her that the cat was twelve years old, and she said, ‘Wow! Still truckin’ along, huh?’ Who says such a thing?”
“Is twelve that impressive for a cat?”
“I didn’t think so.”
Twelve was supposed to be the age that cats started to have health problems. “If she doesn’t make it,” I said carefully, “do you want to have some kind of funeral?”
“She won’t have a funeral. She’s a cat. We’re not having some open-casket affair, with fancy clothes and catering.”
I wondered, “When you do an open-casket funeral, how does the body get there? Like, how does the body arrive from the hospital?”
“Someone has to go pick up the body.”
“And who drives the hearse? Do you drive the hearse? Or do you have a driver that you hire?”
“I have no idea. Do they still use hearses? I can’t remember the last time I saw one.”
“They must still use hearses. How else would they get the coffin there?”
She was tired. “I don’t know how any of this works.”
* * *
“This is becoming insane,” I told her.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“The vet sent us to get a biopsy. Then the biopsy techs sent us to an oncologist. Then the oncologist sent us to an optometrist. Then the optometrist said they didn’t have any openings for two months! And they said our cat needs treatment within weeks! Look how bad the swelling has gotten! Her face is bulging!”
“I’ll schedule a consult with a surgeon. As soon as possible,” she told me.
“Another consult! Every one of these costs another three hundred dollars! With the biopsy, we’ve already spent two thousand bucks, and we’re right where we started! And I can’t get that cat into her cage again. She hates every second of being in there. I hate sitting in the waiting room with her yowling. She never stops.”
“I’ll schedule something,” she promised.
“I just want this to be over already,” I said.
* * *
“Okay,” I said. “Alright.”
She wasn’t going to stop crying. “I hate this. Who has the money for a surgery like that? And she’s already old for a cat. Even if we paid for the surgery, she would only have another year or two.”
Eight thousand dollars for the surgery. Plus another two thousand to do a CT scan first. Ten thousand bucks, for an old cat? That was half of a new car. Ugh, not that cars and cats were a fair comparison. Why was that the first place my thoughts went?
“And what if she wasn’t an old cat?” she asked me. “We would’ve had to pay for it, wouldn’t we?”
“That’d be up to you.”
“It’s not fair that she has to die because of some dollar amount, some number.”
I felt guilty for being relieved. I was not going to spend that kind of money saving an old cat, and if she hadn’t agreed with me, it would’ve been a horrible argument. “No pirate cat, then,” I said.
“No. No pirate cat.”
“Do you want a hug?” I offered.
“I don’t want a hug.”
“Do you want some dinner?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Do you want some tea?”
“You’re not going to make me feel better.”
“Yeah, I’m realizing that.”
“She looks happy. She’s not even in pain.”
“Maybe not. Cats are good at hiding pain.”
She asked me, “Do you remember your friend who had that really old dog? It could barely walk, and he kept giving the dog surgery after surgery just to keep it alive.”
“It becomes almost selfish, after a certain point.”
“It’s extremely selfish,” she said. “That dog was in pain, ready to die, and your friend kept dragging on its miserable existence, just to avoid feeling the emotion of putting his dog to sleep. How old was that dog when it died?”
“It was a very old dog.”
“They say indoor cats are supposed to live twelve to fifteen years.”
“And she’s twelve this year. She’s in the range.”
“I know. I thought it would be fifteen for some reason.”
* * *
“When should we do it?” she asked me.
I looked at the cat. “The swelling started only a couple weeks ago. Look how bad it is already.”
“So?”
“So I don’t think she’s going to last much longer. A month at most, I would guess.”
“Then my cat has four weeks to live.”
“Still truckin’ along,” I said. “Ultimately, it’s up to you.”
She didn’t respond right away. “This is happening so fast.”
“I know.”
“She still looks happy. She’s acting exactly the same.”
“I know.”
“Why does she have to be happy? Does she have any idea of what’s going on?”
I didn’t have any answers. Animals died all the time. Out in the wild, animals died every day, scared and confused. It was supposed to be natural. This felt anything but natural. “When the vet comes to do it, will they take the body for us?”
“I don’t know how it works,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about bringing a vet here to kill her.”
“Maybe instead of thinking about it like a medical procedure, we should think of it like hiring an assassin,” I suggested. “She’s the big boss of a kitty cartel, and she’s got to be stopped.”
“That does make it sound better.”
“Does it really?”
“I don’t know.”
* * *
“I didn’t realize until now how ingrained she was in our routine,” she told me. “She won’t sit in her favorite chair while I work. She won’t come asking when it’s time for dinner. When we get home, she’s not going to come running to the door. And I know we’ll still have her sister, but it’s not the same.”
“It’s not the same,” I agreed.
“I’m not ready.”
“A few months ago, I was walking around near downtown and I saw a dead squirrel on the sidewalk. It was during the summer, so I think the heatwave got it. It had all these flies around it. When I took that same walk a few days later, the squirrel was still there.”
“Nobody cleaned it up?”
“Who would want to? The second time I saw it, it was deflated, and it was covered with bugs. It looked awful. A few more days went by, and I saw the squirrel a third time. It looked like a mummy at that point, this gray thing that wasn’t quite a skeleton.”
“And still, nobody had cleaned it up.”
“I certainly wasn’t going to. More days passed, and I saw it a fourth time. It was just bones. I didn’t even recognize it at first. It was this dirty white shape that could’ve been crumpled paper. Then the next time I walked down that street, there was no trace of it.”
“Every living thing dies. But we’ve created a society where we pretend it’s never going to happen.”
“Humans are the only ones who can’t seem to grasp death. We got too good at living.”
“Which of us do you think will die first?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I hope it’s me,” she said.
* * *
“It’ll happen in two weeks.”
“How will it work?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she told me.
“What room of the house are we supposed to do this in?”
“The vet will figure it out.”
“When the day comes, do we put her sister away? Lock her in a room somewhere?”
“Why would we do that?” she asked.
“Because it’d be, I don’t know, traumatizing! How does a cat interpret it? She’ll see some stranger come into the house and murder her sibling!”
“It will be fine.”
“And she’s still acting healthy! What if the vet sees that she’s acting normal, and refuses to put her down?”
“I doubt it would be an issue,” she said.
“Look how swollen her face is! What if she doesn’t make it two more weeks?”
“I don’t know,” she told me.
“What if we wake up tomorrow and there’s a dead cat at the foot of our bed?”
“I don’t know.”
“What would we do with the body? Could we go out and bury her in a field? Is that allowed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do we look up a pet crematorium and throw her corpse in the back of the car?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would we stuff her body in a trash bag? How does this work?”
“I don’t know.”
“How the fuck does this work?”
“I don’t know.”
“How does this fucking work?”
“I don’t know.”
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